Challenge

The Church Pension Group (CPG) provides comprehensive retirement, health, life insurance, disability coverage, and other benefits to its clergy and lay employees of the Protestant Episcopal Church. Comprising of five different companies and over nine billion dollars in assets, CPG was generating more documents each year and its current document management system, Interwoven, had become too rigid for its changing business requirements.

The company needed a document management system that provided greater flexibility and integration, comprehensive records management, collaboration and had a lower cost of ownership. The system would serve as a content platform for the entire company. All content generated from the different companies would be stored in one central repository providing the CPG more control and easier management of content.

In addition, CPG had begun adopting open source technology and wanted to implement a new content platform on a Linux server stack.

Solution

CPG evaluated a number of open source and proprietary document management systems and selected Alfresco Enterprise because it offered greater flexibility, records management functionality and was open source. Alfresco enterprise-level support services were also a determining factor and were not available with other open source solutions.

By going with an open source tool, CPG is able to reduce its IT costs over the long term with lower licensing costs and by using the Linux server stack. The company saw this as a win–win scenario. They have the benefits of open source combined with Alfresco’s open architecture and rich document and records management functionality.

With Alfresco, CPG has been able to expand its document management footprint and offer users new collaborative features. Using Alfresco Share, CPG built a collaborative portal for employees to share and work on projects together. The portal is instrumental in helping the customer service team collaborate to address customer questions and issues more quickly.

By using Alfresco metadata, CPG can route documents accurately to each business unit. For example, documents are captured through Kofax, which creates a PDF document with metadata tags. CPG has built custom batching units so that documents are routed to the correct business unit and stored in Alfresco. Appropriate workflows are started for documents based on set criteria. CPG uses custom profiles in Alfresco Share to ensure that data/information from the documents are tagged and categorized properly for easy document search and navigation.

CPG also integrated Alfresco with its existing Oracle’s Siebel CRM system using the CMIS standard. CPG users can quickly and easily view and access any customer documents such as policies, changes to benefits or open enrollment documents in Oracle.

During the implementation and first year of use, CPG worked closely with Alfresco Support Services to address any questions on application development. CPG has been impressed with how quickly Alfresco Support is able to respond and resolve issues.

The Support team worked with CPG to ensure its successful use of Alfresco. In addition, the CPG IT team attended Alfresco training seminars which have been extremely informative and provided hands on training on key topics such as records management.

Conclusion

By replacing Interwoven with Alfresco, CPG is able to more easily control and manage all company documents in one repository.

CPG’s current document repository is over 300GB with load of over two million documents. The company projects it will grow to over three million documents in 2012.

CPG is able to leverage the benefits of opens source technology and implement Alfresco on a Linux server stack.

CPG now has a highly available content platform and no longer experiences system downtime. Content is easily accessible and available to users when they need it.

CPG now has an agile, rapid development environment that allows them quickly respond to changing business needs.

What’s Next

CPG is committed to grow with Alfresco and is in the process of rolling out the Alfresco Records Management (RM) capabilities. Using defined metadata within Alfresco RM, CPG will be able to create retention policies and workflows to help manage a document through its entire lifecycle.

CPG will have access to full audit logs enabling their Records Managers to track who did what and when for each record.

CPG manages over $9 billion in assets and as a result generates a lot of customer documentation. Having a content platform that is secure, flexible and can integrate with our other systems is essential to our business. The Alfresco Content platform provides us with a modern architecture for managing all our content and can easily adapt to business and regulatory changes. Plus, Alfresco support is top-notch. They are committed to helping us succeed.
— Andrew Sosa, Director, Content Solutions, Church Pension Group